"A mushroom lasts for only a very short time. Often I go in the woods thinking, after all these years, I ought finally to be bored with fungi. But, coming upon any mushroom in good condition, I lose my mind all over again. Supreme good fortune: we're both alive!"
• Email: paddyagius@hotmail.com
• Discord: Shmin#8422
• Twitter: @PaddyAgius
• RateYourMusic: ~Shmin
My name is Paddy Agius, and I am an independent writer and musician from Nottingham in the UK. Most of my written works that can be found on this are short essays about aesthetics which are informed by observations from phenomenology and history, but there are some exceptions if you want to look for them. In recent months these pieces have taken the form of short excerpts taken from my upcoming novel Aftermath Campaign. As a musician I dropped my first live album, called Source Massive, on the 5th of June. It is a collection of three half-an-hour live sets of experimental dance music that I performed this year.
Aftermath Campaign is a novel about a group of people who, from the mid 00s to the mid 10s, play a single longform fantasy roleplaying game over internet forums. The book loosely follows their campaign, but is structured as a set of freeform essays which use the substance of this game and these players to discuss philosophy, history, the nature of storytelling and the disintegration of the kinds of online space they once knew. My progress counter tells me that I am about three quarters of the way to completion, and I think the counter is fairly trustworthy.
If you're wondering where to start with the writing on this site, the this page collects everything I have published here. If a cryptic list of titles isn't your thing some of my better pieces include:
• The Alien Snail That Lives With You in Symbiosis; or, Rave Embeddings
• Hyperoptics: Lessons From Cinematic Vision
• Five UK Dance Tunes From the Year 2000
• Eleven Aphorisms About Silence via Dreaming or Structure or Both
The first is about the philosophy of technology, the second is about the aesthetics of modernism, the third is a collection of essays about music, and the fourth is a collection of short poetic utterances.
Nearly all my time spent writing goes into the novel, but some of my other long term projects are a book which combines the philosophy of time and a history of dance music, currently in its planning stage, and a collection of short stories. I don’t have any idea what I will call the collection, but some of the working titles for stories I plan to include are Villa of the Deaf One, The Gorilla Herders, and Dialogue Unearthed in the Aswan Geniza Between Kesta Wahed and Alexandrian Dhimmi Theologians Concerning Divine Mind. All of these have been started but none of them will be finished before Aftermath Campaign is.
Source Massive is the result of several years of planning and technical groundwork and several months of composition and performances. More information about what it is specifically can be found in the form of liner notes in the BandCamp page and on this site. The album includes three recordings, and I plan on releasing some sequels that include any further performances further down the line. But before they are released I will be releasing a set of EPs featuring studio recordings of the compositions included in the live sets. All of these EPs will include multiple versions of the tracks by me, as well as remixes. If you are interested in working on a remix, please get in contact with me via one of the links above and we can work something out.
Besides my own work I started keeping a charts page on this site which lists my 100 favourite rave tracks of every year. I haven't had the time to update it in a while, but I have made lists from 2025 all the way back to 1994 so far. A lot of work went into the lists, so I hope you enjoy.
